Comments on: Forget Personality Tests – Your E-mail Habits Tell You Who You Are!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Finally! No more personality tests! I’ll just check my e-mail habits. I have a feeling this is far more accurate than people think.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Check out the excellent book “Never Check Your E-mail in the Morning” by Linda Morgenstern (I believe that’s who wrote it). In fact, Phil – I think you’ve mentioned her book in a blog before. It’s an excellent resource for anyone time-challenged, especially if e-mail is a huge time suck… Keep these things coming. E-mail is bogging down more people than we can imagine, and anything to help us with the bondage is terrific…

By: Joseph Bruno

Joseph Bruno — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I have most of it going directly into specific folders, the inbox I eventually go through and move to folders. I try to delete as much as I can.

By: Kimi Cowden

Kimi Cowden — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Interesting–I fall into the folders category. I check my email several times a day (not quite hourly) and delete many forwards without viewing –clean my spam–and then open and appropriate the rest. If I notice I have been sent a forwarded “blessing-prayer-funny etc.. email by someone who has a more sensitive personality then I will send it back with a few other name thrown on to look as if I responded but I don’t send it to all of my addresses if not then I just delete. Most of what I keep are articles of interest then I put them in appropriate files–Devotionals-Marketplace-Recipes-kids sports/school info-etc..

By: Kathleen MacIver

Kathleen MacIver — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I found this whole premise to be based on an odd assumption...and that's that the goal of an inbox was to be empty.

What do I do? Well... I have about 300 emails come in each day, and only 5% are spam. The rest are automatically filtered into folders according to e-group, client, group of friends, banking, etc.

Most of these folders have hundreds of emails over the last few years. I try to delete emails if I know I won't need to reference them, but I rarely remember to go back and do that, if I replied to them.

So every day, when I check email, I zip down through the folders, deleting those that don't need a reply, replying to those that do or that I want to reply to, and marking read those that just need to be held onto for reference. My shopping folder, which is where the advertisements from online stores get sent to (courtesy of a special email address), is full of unread emails. But every month or two I just delete all the old ones.

So what does that say about me?

By: Jay Caruso

Jay Caruso — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Are they talking specifically about unread emails or emails in your inbox in general? I hope it would mean unread because I don’t bother cleaning my inbox with my Gmail account. There’s 7K messages and I’m using 5% of my total space alotted to me. Essentially what I do is star important emails I want to refer back to. I haven’t kept all of them because I think I may need something sent to me 2 years ago, but I don’t sense any urgency to clean it all out because I’ve got so much space available to me.

By: Rachelle

Rachelle — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I actually handle most of my job via email so it’s not so much a distraction from work, it IS my work. Still, I have a hard time staying on top of it. I have 137 emails in my inbox right now, and these are mostly emails requiring a response. (Not spam or silly things from friends.) Awhile back I set a goal to get my box below 10 every evening, but I’ve rarely been able to do it. So basically I feel behind all the time.